“We’re confusing them.” Tolliver stepped a little closer and put his hand on my shoulder. “The girls may have their problems, but they’re doing better with Iona than they would with us. We can’t take care of them. We travel too much. Iona and Hank are responsible people, and they don’t use alcohol or drugs. They take the girls to church; they make sure they’re in school.”

“Are you serious?” I said, though I’d never known Tolliver to be facetious about family topics. I felt blindsided. “You know I’ve never thought we should take the girls away, even if we could legally manage it. You seriously think we should keep even our visits to a minimum? See them even less?”

“I do,” he said.

“Explain.”

“When we show up—well, to start with, we come here so . . . irregularly, and we never stay long. We take them out, we try to show them things they don’t get to see, we try to interest them in things that’re not part of their daily life—and then we vanish, leaving their, well, their ‘parents,’ to deal with the result.”

“The result? What result? We’re the bad fairies or something?” I was trying very hard not to get angry.

“Iona told me last time—you remember, you took them to the movies—that it usually took her and Hank a week to get the girls back into their routine after one of our visits.”

“But . . .” I didn’t know where to start. I shook my head, as if that would arrange my thoughts in order. “We’re supposed to do things for Iona’s convenience? We’re the girls’ brother and sister. We love them. They need to know the whole world isn’t like Iona and Hank.” My voice rose.

Tolliver sat down on the bathtub’s side. “Harper, Iona and Hank are raising them. They didn’t have to take them in; the state would have taken them if Iona and Hank hadn’t volunteered. I can almost guarantee that the court would have kept Mariella and Gracie in a foster home rather than giving them to us. We’re lucky Iona and Hank were willing to give it a shot. They’re older than most parents of kids that age. They’re strict because they’re scared the girls will turn out like your mom, or my dad. But they adopted the girls. They’re the parents.”

I opened my mouth, closed it. It was like a dam had broken in Tolliver’s head, and I was hearing thoughts I’d never heard before, pouring straight out of his mouth.

“Sure, they’re limited in their thinking,” he said. “But they’re the ones who have to cope with Gracie and Mariella, day after day. They go to the teacher conferences; they go to the meetings with the principal; they take the girls to get their shots; and they take them to the doctor when they’re sick. They enforce the bedtimes and the study times. They buy the clothes. They’ll get the braces.” He shrugged. “All that stuff. We can’t do that.”